Category: vSAN

And yet another series, I’d like to call it – Whiteboard. It’s about me trying to give a little deeper dive into a specific subject in the format of whiteboarding. So the first session will be a closer look at VMware vSAN.

I arrived yesterday and VMworld started today for me as I’m working for a VMware distributor I attended a bootcamp focusing on vSAN. The core of the session is to enable partners to achieve the VTSP certification (a pre sales certification) but a was more of an open discussion with some of the greatest minds on vSAN. james LeFort, Jeff Hunter, Pete Koehler, John Nicholson amongst others.

It was a really great session, a lot of topics were discussed – high and low. A huge boost of confidence in vSAN.

Summing it all upp, it was a great start to VMworld and I’m now as excited as ever for the main event, but tomorrow will be some additional partner training before VMworld starts on monday – should also be fun!

A few days ago VMware Education released a brand new series of exams with the badge name “Specialist”. Currently there are two exams available, vSAN 2017 (called 2VB-601 in official certification lingo) and vRealize Operations 2017 (2VB-602). I do like a good challenge so I scheduled the exam basically as soon as I heard about the exam and started preparing for it immediately – I basically only had a days worth of preparation due to the fact I wanted it done before heading out to Las Vegas and VMworld 2017 (but I’ve been using, talking and writing about vSAN for quite a while) . You can read more on what’s expected of you before scheduling the exam here. But in short, if you hold a valid VCP6 for any solution track you can just schedule the exam.

So how did I prepare for the exam? Well, as I already mentioned I’ve been using vSAN for a long time but more recently I attended the instructor lead vSAN class in April without knowing that there would be a certification introduced just a few months later. The class I attended was called VMware Virtual SAN: Deploy and Manage [V6.2] and as you probably guessed already based on the name was focused on vSAN version 6.2. So now I have access to the official “Student Lecture Manual” that goes along with the class, obviously that’s a good starting point as far as studying goes.

And for some hands on experience I’d recommend the VMware Hands On Labs (free of charge – thats just fantastic, thanks VMware!) where you can find lots of labs and a few vSAN related labs as well. Or if you have a home lab I would really recommend William Lams automated vSphere Lab Deployment – I use it all the time and it’s nothing short of amazing!

Another great resource is of course the VMware SABU (Storage and Availability Business Unit) team’s resource page for technical documentation called storage hub. Two documents I found useful were called “VMware vSAN 6.5 Technical Overview” and also the latest version “VMware vSAN 6.6 Technical Overview”.

Don’t forget to read through the exam prep guide either. It’s the exam blue print stating all the topics that will be covered on the exam. Quite important.

The exam itself consist of 60 multiple choice type of questions. You’re allotted 105 minutes to complete the exam with an automatic 30 minute language extension, and that should be more than enough time to complete the exam. I tend to do exams rather fast, but I spent roughly 45-50 minutes on the test including reviews.

And as always, when you click to end the test it takes a few seconds to understand and have it sink in if you passed the test or not. And I did, so now I’m officially not only a vExpert vSAN but also a VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist. Woho me!

Through out the years I’ve always believed that blogging is a great way of sharing information. I’ve followed lots of blogs for my own learning process (too many to mention but a huge thanks to all my fellow bloggers) and enjoy reading high level posts as well as deep dives. That’s the beauty when bloggning, the posts can be about anything, high or low, 10 000 feet or up close an personal. When I started bloggning it was with that same feeling of letting other people know about this great new thing I discovered or how easy it was to set up a specific function, basically sharing is caring.

So sharing comes first but when it leads to some sort of recognition it really makes blogging even more exciting. I’ve had the great fortune of being appointed as a VMware vExpert 8 times, I have to pinch myself to really understand and let that sink in. Wow, that’s amazing, all I ever wanted to do was to share some bits and pieces that was running through my mind. So I’m really blessed with the recognition I’ve already received but today is yet another good day.

This morning when I woke up I saw an email from Corey Romero, responsible for the vExpert program over at VMware. Corey usually sends a few emails a week so nothing out of the ordinary at that point, but the subject got me really excited. It read “Welcome to the 2017 vExpert VSAN Program”. Jumping up and down with joy. It, at first, didn’t really sink in so I had to visit the announcement page to verify that my name was there…And yes it was. So I’m humbled, proud as can be and now I’m even more excited to leave for VMworld in just over a week.

A great big “Thanks” to all the bloggers I ever followed, to VMware for the great products, again to VMware for having such a great recognition program in vExpert and to anyone that reads and promote blogs.

I’ve been thinking about creating and sharing short (no more than say 30 minutes) videos of how certain functions or features works and how to set it up. I’m going to create a series of video content that might be useful over the next few week. I’ve decided to name the series “how and why” since this is the angle I’m taking – how do you setup the feature and whats the benefit of actually using the feature.

So the inaugural video will be based on VMware vSAN. Feel free to drop me tweet on future videos you’d like to see.

In a previous post I went through a list of my personal favorite features in vSphere 6.5. VMware vSAN is on of them, it’s a storage solution that handles your virtual machines – amongst others as we shall see today.

One of the nicest features introduced for vSAN in vSphere 6.5 is the ability to attach physical servers to the vSAN cluster. By letting the vSAN handle the iSCSI volume, since it’s just another object in the vSAN, you can apply the same policies on that volume as you do on the vSAN datastore used for you virtual machines. And that means you’re able to manage the performance and/or availability, not just when initially setting up the volume but any time the requirements change for the volume you’re able to adapt.

So is it hard setting up vSAN with iSCSI targets and attaching physical servers to it? Not at all, it’s quite easy actually. Let me show you how easy it is. But first we have to create a vSphere cluster with vSAN enabled and configured. Now, I’m a big fan of PowerCLI and automating a lab environment set-up is thanks to William Lam a breeze. I’ve adjusted his script slightly to allow me to select 3 different sizes of the ESXi hosts to choose from: small, medium or large. This allows me within 30 minutes to have a lab consisting of 3 ESXi hosts and a vCenter appliance up and running, configured with a cluster and vSAN enabled. The medium and large size configurations would normally be used for VMware NSX labs and demos.

It might not be the intended use case, but wouldn’t it be fun to host virtual machines from a Hyper-v environment on a vSAN? “Why?” I hear you say, no reason, just because we can!

PowerCLI

So first thing is to execute the PowerCLI script to bring my lab environment online:

Logging on to vCenter will now show the three hosts in a cluster with a new datastore created, a vSAN datastore.

Next, we need to enable the iSCSI functionality, which is a simple process:

Enabling the Virtual SAN iSCSI target service requires some input, specifically

Default iSCSI network to use – in a production environment you’d probably want to set up a dedicated VMkernel iSCSI interface for this.

Default TCP port – usually no need to change this

Default authentication – If you’d like you can set up the connection to use either None, CHAP or Mutual CHAP

Storage Policy for the home object – Using the predefined storage policies you can have the home object that stores metadata for the iSCSI target protected for host failures

If you want, you can create a new policy with specific settings for iSCSI Targets and Home object:

The default vSAN storage policy is used.

It protects you against one host failure, to do that it will have the object placed on two different hosts. This means it will use twice the space assigned to an object/VMDK file from the vSAN datastore.

Next up, creating a target and LUN:

You create both the Target IQN (with the desired settings and policies) and a LUN. Depending on the LUN Storage Policy you are using you will consume space from the vSAN datastore accordingly:

Now the set-up of the Target and the LUN is done. It’s that simple! After this point you can attach any physical server using iSCSI to the vSAN datastore and use the resources. In my lab though, I’m going to use a virtual machine from another host to emulate a physical machine.

You probably don’t want just any old server being able to attach to the LUN, so you can configure which initiators are allowed to connect. Either use individual IQNs or create a group of IQNs.

Let’s take a look what has happened on the vSAN Datastore:

We can now clearly see that there’s a new VMDK file that we can handle just as any other VMDK file, inflate it, move it or delete it:

Next up: Creating a Windows Server 2016 VM (emulating a physical machine) that will connect and use the new vSAN LUN we created.

Setting up the VM is pretty straight forward.

Select the desired OS:

Here’s where we need to make changes, first assign at least two CPUs to the VM and secondly tick the box for hardware virtualization (otherwise the role Hyper-V won’t be able to start or be installed).

The summary page shows us what settings we’ve selected for the VM

We run through the installation of the operating system. Configure everything we need, a static IP address, updating windows and so on: